Speed up Ubuntu 12.xx

Hi thanks to Nixie Pixel for showing some speedup tips on Ubuntu. I've tried these out on both a couple of VM boxes and a physical PC and can say they work well! Here they are:

Show all startup items

Ubuntu hides some startup items by default, by entering this in the terminal you will be able to see all startup items and disable if required, for instance Bluetooth daemon.

sudo sed -i "s/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g" /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

Preload

In order to speed up applications by loading frequently used libraries, go to the Ubuntu software centre and install the 'Preload' application.

Speed up Gedit

 A bug in a plugin in Gedit causes poor performance - go to > Edit > Preferences > Plugins and untick the 'File Browser Panel'

Install SOLR 3.5 on Centos

Install Centos 32 or 64 bit on the relevant hardware or VM accepting all default installation options

Install Tomcat 6.x from the Centos package manager

Modify startup items to make sure Tomcat 6 runs at boot time. Please note startup items are user specific, so if logged in as administrator, root would not have Tomcat startup automatically

Reboot the server

Test if Tomcat is working by opening Firefox and navigating to http://localhost:8080/manager/html

Download the TGZ binary (non src) version of SOLR 3.5 from http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.apache.org//lucene/solr/3.5.0/

Decompress file to /OPT/SOLRBINARY (you will need to create this folder)

Copy the whole SOLR folder from /OPT/SOLRBINARY/apache-solr-3.5.0/example/  to /OPT/

Running as root, open a terminal and run the following - CHMOD 777 –R /OPT

Copy the Tomcat SOLR webapp (the .WAR file) from /OPT/SOLRBINARY/apache-solr-3.5.0/dist to /OPT/SOLR/ and rename it to solr.war

Now copy this solr.war file to /USR/SHARE/TOMCAT6/WEBAPPS

From the command line terminal run (as root): service tomcat6 restart

Now, to fix library bugs copy the following from /OPT/SOLRBINARY/apache-solr-3.5.0/contrib./extraction/lib: (where x is version number)

Tika-core-x.jar

Xmlbeans-x.jar

Xml-apis-x.jar

Xercesimpl-x.jar

Copy to /USR/SHARE/TOMCAT6/WEBAPPS/SOLR/WEB-INF/LIB

From the command line terminal run (as root): service tomcat6 restart

Set the solr/home value in the /USR/SHARE/TOMCAT6/WEBAPPS/SOLR/WEB-INF/web.xml file by editing and un-commenting the following and changing the paths to those shown below:

   solr/home

   /OPT/SOLR

   java.lang.String

There is a bug in the 3.5.x velocity writer module and to fix this edit OPT/SOLR/CONF/SOLRCONFIG.XML and comment out line 1554 (which starts ‘Query Response Writer Velocity’)

Copy your custom schema.xml file to /OPT/SOLR/CONF/SCHEMA.XML (if you have one)

From the command line terminal run (as root): service tomcat6 restart

Reboot the server

Test if Solr is running by going to: http://localhost:8080/solr/admin

Copy or create a PDF file locally on the SOLR server and place it in /OPT/SOLR (make sure the PDF is a ‘text’ PDF containing searchable strings

Open a terminal and navigate to /OPT/SOLR

Test an indexing of a file by using curl to upload the PDF file:

curl “http://localhost:8080/solr/update/extract?literal.id=smoketest&commit=true –F “myfile=@testpdf.pdf”

Navigate back to http://localhost:8080/solr/admin and in the ‘Query String’ box enter:

id:smoketest

Then press ‘search’

An XML results page should be displayed with your PDF file as the search result

Optimise Mac Lion

• Reset the MBP PRAM - From cold, hold down the 'command' + 'option' + P + R keys, let the system start up and keep them held down until you hear the startup chime twice, when you hear it a second time, let go of the keys and let the system boot.
• Once booted, wait a minute or two, then do a cold shutdown Then do a normal startup and once again a cold shutdown
• Now start up again from cold, this time, hold down the SHIFT key The system will start in cache rebuild mode and will ask you to log in Wait a minute and do a cold shutdown
• Now boot up again normally and your system should be optimised
• Drink coffee
• Now go off and download Onyx for Lion
• http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php?sid=8bfe2d8127da2b3c2640d2a3a706395d